Credit: MarvelSecret Invasion star, Ben Mendelsohn, has been a featured actor in a number of films with heavy pop culture fandoms. He has starred in Rogue One as Orson Krennic , Ready Player One as Sorrento, The Dark Knight Rises as Daggett and most recently, Captain Marvel and Secret Invasion as Talos. The outspoken Aussie thespian expressed in an interview that compared to Dr. Doom, one of the greatest Marvel villains of all time, the Fantastic Four as characters “suck.”
He continued to profess his disdain for the Fantastic Four while addressing his fervent admiration for the super-powered quartet’s biggest nemesis. The honest comment stemmed from the question of which Marvel character he would choose to shapeshift into if he had the abilities of his Skrull character, Talos. He immediately stated that he would become the armor clad, nation-ruling sorcerer, Victor Von Doom.
The response manifested into a longer discussion of why Doctor Doom is such a compelling and magnetic figure. Mendelsohn’s distaste for Marvel’s original Silver-Age superhero team derives from that fact that he believes Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm are just dull by contrast. He emphasized Doom’s sympathetic backstory about how the trauma of losing his family galvanized him to become a master of science and sorcery. He used these commendable qualities of steadfast resilience and willpower to cement his royal legacy and protector of his country, Latveria.
Mendelsohn criticized the Fantastic Four as team since they were Marvel’s first attempt to make a superhero group before nailing it with the X-Men. He did give credit to the Fantastic Four comic series as a whole because Doom and the Skrulls would not have existed without them. While Mendelsohn’s pointed opinions can be disputed by fans, he did bring up an issue that Marvel Studios would need to address in the future.
There have been three notable Fantastic Four movies made when they were owned by the studio formerly known as 20th Century Fox. Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) generated moderate success with a combined $662 million box office, but it was no where near as successful as X-Men or Spider-Man. Another Fantastic Four film was released in 2015, but creative differences and poor planning by the director and studio led to it being a box office disaster.
The failure of the 2015 iteration led to a fan fatigue towards these characters, but the reemergence of John Krasinski as Mr. Fantastic in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness hyped up fans once again with the potential of the Fantastic Four’s presence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Time will tell how Marvel Studios will adapt the super team, but the right course of action is to make sure that the next adaptation is a character-driven film and not a mindless action spectacle with the dreadfully overused sky beam.